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Thanks to artificial intelligence, understanding animals may be closer than we think. But we may not like what they are going to tell us, says RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood

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From the benefits of fermented foods to diets that promise a better hormone balance, there is a confusing array of dietary advice out there

Several newspapers have refused to endorse any candidate for the upcoming Presidential election. These (infamously) include the Wall Street Journal  (which hasn’t endorsed a candidate since Herbert Hoover), and the Washington Post, but there are many other papers who refused to endorse as well, including the Minnesota Star-Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times, as well as several large newspaper chains.  In the case of the Post, owner Jeff Bezos said that the paper will no longer make any Presidential endorsements (that of course could change should the ownership change.) From the link above:

Big headlines popped up in media circles last week when the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times blocked editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. News staff turmoil followed with resignations at the Times and op-eds and a petition from opinion writers at the Post.

USA Today, which endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 38 years in 2020, has reverted to neutrality. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t backed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover. If it were to shift course in the next few days, that would be a true October surprise.

That leaves The New York Times by its lonesome among national newspapers in still endorsing (Harris, of course, several times over).

I had already been looking at regional papers, where the steady move away from taking sides in presidential elections has become an epidemic. The largest chains — Gannett and Alden Global’s MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing — have all stopped. (Hearst and Advance Local still leave their papers the option.)

Independent, locally owned organizations dominate the shrinking list of holdouts. Here, too, disengagement is becoming a trend. The highly regarded (and recently renamed) Minnesota Star Tribune alerted readers on Sept. 23 that no endorsement would be forthcoming.

When the Washington Post refused to endorse, the theory immediately spread that Jeff Bezos, who apparently overrode the editors’ decision to endorse Harris, had become “politically neutral” as a nefarious ploy as insurance against a Trump victory. (Apparently Amazon, also owned by Bezos, might stand to lose substantial government business, as Trump is known to be a retributive person.)

Now I am not sure what motivaated Bezos to do this.  But, as I said, I was willing to be charitable and assumed that Bezos, like the other owners, were being institutionally neutral as a way to maintain their papers’ reputation for objectivity in the news. Other people were not so charitable, and, in the end, we cannot know what was in Bezos’s mind.

But he did explain his decision in a new Washington Post editorial, and it comes down to the institutional neutrality explanation. (He does admit that the timing was bad.) You can read it yourself by clicking on the headline below or find the article archived here. Whether you believe Bezos or not is up to you, but I think that at least as a long-term strategy to prevent people from distrusting the media, journalistic neutrality in both news and lack of official endorsements is the way to go.

I’ll quote Bezos (indented):

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

. . . Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.

. . . You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

. . . While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it.

As I said, lots of people won’t believe him, nor do they think the L.A. Times‘s failure to endorse a candidate was principled, as the owner has $6 billion. But what about all those other newspapers and chains? All hedging their bets against a Trump victory?

Perhaps, but I am still in favor of ideological neutrality. And what paper would adopt such neutrality, say, two years after an election? The timing was uncomfortably close to the election, which is bad, but I still think Bezos’s decision is a harbinger of good things that promote freedom of speech and thought. And I now that many readers will disagree with me.

The paper even has an article about Bezos’s refusal to endorse, which you can read by clicking on the headline below, or reading the archived version here.

And some straight reporting on the fallout:

The op-ed, which appears in Tuesday’s print edition, comes as nearly one-third of The Post’s 10-member editorial board stepped down Monday in the wake of Bezos’s decision.

The board members — all of whom have said they intend to remain at the newspaper in other roles — include David E. Hoffman, a 42-year Washington Post veteran who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for columns on autocracy and resigned Thursday, the day before publisher William Lewis shocked the board by announcing the decision to cease a long-standing practice of issuing endorsements in presidential races. Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she is stepping down. The third board member is Mili Mitra, who also serves as director of audience for The Post’s opinions section. Bezos made no mention of the resignations in his opinion piece.

. . . The Post’s editorial board is part of the newspaper’s opinions section, which operates independently from the staff that provides news coverage. The remaining members of the board following Monday’s board resignations are Shipley, Charles Lane, Stephen Stromberg, Mary Duenwald, James Hohmann, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.

“It’s extremely difficult for us because we built this institution,” Hoffman said in an interview before the public announcement of his decision to step down. “But we can’t give up on our American democracy or The Post.”

Finally, as Bezos surely would have known, his decision to avoid endorsement cost the paper, and cost it seriously. The headline below tells the tale. Click on it or find it.  archived here:

An excerpt:

At least 250,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions since the news organization announced Friday that the editorial page would end its decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates. The figures represent about 10 percent of The Post’s digital subscribers.

The Post began experiencing a huge spike in the number of subscribers looking to cancel online starting Friday in the wake of the announcement by CEO and publisher William Lewis,according to documents and two people familiar with the figures who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment publicly. By Tuesday, the number reached 250,000, the documents indicate.

The number does not take into account how many new subscribers have signed up for The Post during the same period, or how many who canceled may have changed their minds later and re-subscribed.It’s also unclear how many of those who canceled subscriptions also receive print editions of The Post.

A Post spokeswoman declined to comment on subscription numbers. The Post is a privately held company that does not typically share such data with the public.

. . .But despite the assurances from Bezos and Lewis, the blowback has been intense. More than 20 Post opinion columnists dissented in a piece The Post published, and three members of the editorial board stepped down from that role, while remaining on the staff.

Tens of thousands of readers left comments on The Post stories about the fallout, including from those who said they were canceling subscriptions after being loyal readers for decades, alarmed by what they viewed as a capitulation to Donald Trump.

, , ,The Post saw its digital subscribers peak at 3 million in January 2021. It has dropped off since then to about 2.5 million now.

The company was projected to lose $100 million last year, but ended up losing $77 million after an employee buyout program reduced company staffing by about 10 percent. Bezos brought in Lewis this year to help recover lost subscriptions and grow other parts of the business.

Earlier this month, employees were told at a companywide meeting, which was also reported by the New York Times, that The Post was starting to see modest, positive subscriber growth after two years of declining numbers.

As I said, Bezos surely would have foreseen this. So if you take the less charitable view of his actions, he courted Trump knowing that it would cost the paper dearly, and even, perhaps, bring about its death. Perhaps he didn’t predict so many lost subscribers, and made a calculation that Trump’s favor (if he won) would be worth the subscription loss.

Readers have to decide for themselves here. I cannot psychologize Bezos, but in the end I think the trend towards increasing journalistic neutrality is a salubrious occurrence.

Most ingredients touted as the key to better health fail to live up to the hype but fibre bucks this trend, with benefits for the whole body, not just the gut

A fossil of a tadpole from Argentina is 161 million years old - and isn't that different from some modern species

A massive undertaking to map cancer tumours is providing new insights into how the disease forms, evolves and develops resistance to treatments

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called “uncool,” came with this sentence:

I don’t think anybody’s going to like this one.

I like it, because it reminds me of the old Jewish joke, one I’m sure I told before:

Jewish pessimist: “Oy! Things can’t get any worse!”
Jewish optimist:   “Sure they can!”

Jesus and Mo wind up being Jewish optimists.

Neutron stars are as dense as the nucleus of an atom. They contain a star’s worth of matter in a sphere only a dozen kilometers wide. And they are light-years away. So how can we possibly understand their interior structure? One way would be to simply spin it. Just spin it faster and faster until it reaches a maximum limit. That limit can tell us about how neutron stars hold together and even how they might form. Obviously, we can’t actually spin up a neutron star, but it can happen naturally, which is one of the reasons astronomers are interested in these maximally spinning stars. And recently a team has discovered a new one.

All neutron stars rotate on their axes. They form from the collapse of a massive star’s core, and just as an ice skater spins faster as they pull in their arms, a neutron star spins up as it forms. Young neutron stars can rotate hundreds of times a second, though they generally slow down as they age. Interactions between their magnetic fields and interstellar space cause their rate of rotation to decay. This is why, for example, we can observe pulsars gradually slow down over time.

But many neutron stars have a binary companion. If their companion happens to be a closely orbiting regular star, the neutron star can pull off some of the companion’s outer layer and capture it. The slow exchange of matter can cause the neutron star to speed up as it essentially steals some of the orbital angular momentum of the companion. They are known as millisecond pulsars because they emit a radio pulse every few milliseconds. They are the fastest-rotating stars in the cosmos.

So, just how fast can these neutron stars spin? The record for the fastest spinning pulsar is held by PSR J1748–2446ad. Observations in 2004 and 2005 confirmed it rotates 716 times per second. That’s a bit faster than number two, which rotates at 707 times a second. This new study has found another neutron star rotating at 716 times a second, and it’s interesting because it isn’t a pulsar.

X-ray burst showing the 716 Hz oscillation. Credit: Jaisawal, et al

Known as 4U 1820-30, it is part of a binary X-ray system. As the neutron star captures material from its companion, part of its surface will heat up to such a degree that it emits X-rays. As the neutron star rotates, the hot-spot swings in and out of view, and we observe a periodic pulsation of X-rays. Using NASA’s NICER X-ray telescope, the team observed the binary from 2017 to 2021 and captured data on 15 powerful X-ray bursts. One of these bursts had a clear periodicity of 716 Hz. This strongly suggests the neutron star rotates at that rate.

While it could just be a statistical fluke, the fact that we now have two 716 Hz neutron stars found in two different ways suggests they may be near the maximal rotation limit for a neutron star.

Reference: Jaisawal, Gaurava K., et al. “A Comprehensive Study of Thermonuclear X-Ray Bursts from 4U 1820–30 with NICER: Accretion Disk Interactions and a Candidate Burst Oscillation.” The Astrophysical Journal 975.1 (2024): 67.

The post Astronomers Have Found the Fastest Spinning Neutron Star appeared first on Universe Today.

The health benefits of fermented food and drink have long been touted, but firm evidence in favour of kombucha, sauerkraut and kefir is surprisingly elusive

Yesterday we took a drive to Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park, a 2.5-hour trip from where I’m staying in Ivins, Utah.  Bryce is located where the red pin is in this Wikipedia map:

SANtosito, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It turns out that Bryce is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in America—indeed, anywhere on Earth. To me, its splendor, exemplified by the “amphitheaters” that contain the red geological spires known as hoodos, is unparalleled. I’ll show some photos below. First, a few words from Wikipedia:

The major feature of the park is Bryce Canyon, which despite its name, is not a canyon, but a collection of giant natural amphitheaters along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Bryce is distinctive due to geological structures called hoodoos, formed by frost weathering and stream erosion of the river and lake bed sedimentary rock. The red, orange, and white colors of the rocks provide spectacular views for park visitors. Bryce Canyon National Park is much smaller and sits at a much higher elevation than nearby Zion National Park. The rim at Bryce varies from 8,000 to 9,000 feet (2,400 to 2,700 m).

And the geology, which explains these bizarre formations:

The Bryce Canyon area experienced soil deposition that spans from the last part of the Cretaceous period and the first half of the Cenozoic era. The ancient depositional environment varied. Dakota Sandstone and Tropic Shale were deposited in the warm, shallow waters of the advancing and retreating Cretaceous Seaway (outcrops of these rocks are found just outside park borders).

The Laramide orogeny affected the entire western part of what would become North America starting about 70 million to 50 MYA. This event helped to build the Rocky Mountains and in the process closed the Cretaceous Seaway. The Straight Cliffs, Wahweap, and Kaiparowits formations were victims of this uplift. The Colorado Plateaus rose 16 MYA and were segmented into plateaus, separated by faults and each having its own uplift rate.

This uplift created vertical joints, which over time preferentially eroded. The soft Pink Cliffs of the Claron Formation eroded to form freestanding hoodoo pinnacles in badlands, while the more resistant White Cliffs formed monoliths The brown, pink, and red colors are from hematite (iron oxide; Fe2O3); the yellows from limonite (FeO(OH)·nH2O); and the purples are from pyrolusite (MnO2).

So we have a sedimentary sandstone formation that of course formed the seabed, and, under the pressure of colliding tectonic plates (I’m dong the best I can here), produced a huge uplift of the seabed, with Bryce being part of a huge sandstone cliff.  Thrust above the ground, the cliff was subject to erosion as well as weathering as frost and ice invaded the cracks in the soil. That erosion of softer bits, as well as the cracking, created structures like these. These are “mini-hoodoos” that you see before you enter the Park itself:

The area is called “Dixie” because there was a period during which settlers tried to grow cotton in the area. This endeavor ultimately failed, probably because of extreme dryness and lack of water. They haven’t yet purged the name “Dixie” from many institutions and parks, but that will happen. There is even a “Dixie Technical College.”

These are just small previews of the Big Show that is Bryce Canyon:

Entering the park, you’re warned to stay away from prairie dogs (cute rodents in the genus Cynomys) who build extensive underground tunnel systems. Their fleas carry the bacterium the causes bubonic plague, which persists at a low level in the U.S (about nine cases a year in the past couple decades). Now that we have antibiotics, getting plague is no longer the death sentence it was in the Middle Ages.

The glories of the park are the series of hoodoo-containing ampitheaters, which you can see from above by climbing up a short path. They are breathtaking:

These spires are huge, not just small excrescences:

A panorama: be sure to click to enlarge the photo:

The day was bloody cold, with snow on the ground during much of the two-hour drive and some near white-outs. But the weather cleared sufficiently when we got to the Park so that photography was good, in muted light. Here’s my friend Phil Ward standing on the edge of the cliff, trying not to slip and fall into the canyon.

. . . and Professor Ceiling Cat in the same place: a vanity photo

More of the Canyon. It is much smaller than Zion but more breathtaking. You can pretty much take in the whole thing by climbing to one of the lookout points (this one was about 8,000 feet high, so you get out of breath hiking up):

Another panorama: click to enlarge:

After we froze our ears, hands, and noses (there was a stiff wind up there, and the temperature was below freezing), we parked the car overlooking some scenery and had a healthy Phil Ward-ian lunch (turkey breast and cream cheese on walnut bread, along with a ginger drink, a banana, and an apple). Then we repaired to the visitor center, which had good explanations and diagrams of how the park was formed. There were also relics from the Native Americans who lived in this area as well as the Mormon settlers. Here is a water jug from the late 1800s made of resin-coated wood:

There were lots of Bryce-related geegaws for sale in the gift ship, and I had a bit of fun with two pack rat puppets (rodents of the genus Neotoma).

Then it was time for the long drive home, and once again we had to go through snow and rain. But we were fortunate that the weather in the Park was good when we were there, and we could truly say this:

And when we got home, one of the people who co-owns the beautiful house where I’m staying served us raw oysters, grilled oysters, grilled burgers, and then two beautiful grilled ribeye steaks:

And the sun will come out tomorrow (in fact, today). The view from the house where I’m staying:

If you’re in southern Utah, you must visit both Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks. But if you can visit only one, it must be Bryce. Truly, I’ve traveled a lot of this planet, and seen some beautiful places, but Bryce is surely among the top ten. (Others include Mt. Everest from Kala Pattar, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal under a full moon, and almost any part of Antarctica, as well as the giant sequoias of California.)

Feel free to list below the most beautiful places you’ve seen! This might help me amend my bucket list.

Diets that claim to control excess oestrogen or stress hormones are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. They could be good for us, just not for the reasons claimed

On my recent trip to CERN, the lab that hosts the Large Hadron Collider, I had the opportunity to stop by the CERN control centre [CCC]. There the various particle accelerator operations are managed by accelerator experts, who make use of a host of consoles showing all sorts of data. I’d not been to the CCC in person — theoretical physicists congregate a few kilometers away on another part of CERN’s campus — although back in the LHC’s very early days, when things ran less smoothly, I used to watch some of the CCC’s monitoring screens to see how the accelerator was performing.

The atmosphere in the control room was relatively quiet, as the proton-proton collisions for the year 2024 had just come to an end the previous day. Unlike 2023, this has been a very good year. There’s a screen devoted to counting the number of collisions during the year, and things went so well in 2024 it had to be extended, for the first time, by a “1” printed on paper.

The indication “123/fb” means “123-collisions-per-femtobarn”, while one-collision-per-femtobarn corresponds to about 1014 = 100,000,000,000,000 proton-proton collisions. In other words, the year saw more than 12 million billion proton-proton collisions at each of the two large-scale experiments, ATLAS and CMS. That’s about double the best previous year, 2018.

Yes, that’s a line of bottles that you can see on the back wall in the first photo. Major events in the accelerator are often celebrated with champagne, and one of the bottles from each event is saved for posterity. Here’s one from a few weeks ago that marked the achievement of 100-collisions-per-femtobarn.

With another one and a half seasons to go in Run 3 of the LHC, running at 13.6 TeV of energy per collision (higher than the 13 TeV per collision in Run 2 from 2015 to 2018, and the 7 and 8 TeV per collision in Run 1 from 2010 to 2012), the LHC accelerator folks continue to push the envelope. Much more lies ahead in 2029 with Run 4, when the collision rate will increase by another big step.

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili has come to a conclusion:

Hili: Reality is unworkable. A: That’s why so few are treating it seriously.

Hili: Rzeczywistość nie nadaje się do użytku.
Ja: Dlatego niewielu traktuje ją poważnie.

Carbon is the building block for all life on Earth and accounts for approximately 45–50% of all dry biomass. When bonded with elements like hydrogen, it produces the organic molecules known as hydrocarbons. When bonded with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, it produces pyrimidines and purines, the very basis for DNA. The carbon cycle, where carbon atoms continually travel from the atmosphere to the Earth and back again, is also integral to maintaining life on Earth over time.

As a result, scientists believe that carbon should be easy to find in space, but this is not always the case. While it has been observed in many places, astronomers have not found it in the volumes they would expect to. However, a new study by an international team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has revealed a new type of complex molecule in interstellar space. Known as 1-cyanoprene, this discovery could reveal where the building blocks of life can be found and how they evolve.

The research was led by Gabi Wenzel, a postdoctoral researcher from the Department of Chemistry at MIT. She was joined by researchers from the CfA, the University of British Columbia, the University of Michigan, the University of Worchester, the University of Virginia, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and the Astrochemistry Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in the journal Science.

Artist’s impression of complex organic molecules in space. Credit: NSF/NSF NRAO/AUI/S. Dagnello

For their study, the team relied on the NSF Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the most accurate, versatile, and largest fully-steerable radio telescope in the world, located at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. This sophisticated instrument allowed the team to detect the presence of 1-cyanopyrene based on its unique rotational spectrum. 1-cyanoprene is a complex molecule composed of multiple fused benzene rings and belongs to the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAHs) class of molecules. On Earth, they are created by burning fossil fuels or other organic materials, like charred meat or burnt bread.

By studying PHAs, astronomers hope to learn more about their lifecycles and how they interact with the ISM and nearby celestial bodies. As co-author Harshal Gupta, the NSF Program Director for the GBO and a Research Associate at the CfA, explained in a recent CfA press release:

“Identifying the unique rotational spectrum of 1-cyanopyrene required the work of an interdisciplinary scientific team. This discovery is a great illustration of synthetic chemists, spectroscopists, astronomers, and modelers working closely and harmoniously.”

This was an impressive feat due to the difficulty (or even impossibility) of detecting these molecules due to their large size and lack of a permanent dipole moment. “These are the largest molecules we’ve found in TMC-1 to date. This discovery pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the complexity of molecules that can exist in interstellar space,” added co-author MIT professor Brett McGuire, who is also an adjunct astronomer at the NSF and the NRAO.

Previously, these molecules were believed to form only in high-temperature environments, like the region surrounding older stars. This concurs with what astronomers have known for a long time about certain carbon-rich stars, which produce massive amounts of small molecular sheets of carbon that they then distribute into the interstellar medium (ISM). In addition, previous research has suggested that the infrared fluorescence of PAHs – caused by the absorption of ultraviolet radiation from nearby stars – could be responsible for infrared bands observed in many celestial objects.

Artist’s impression of Green Bank Telescope conducting radio astronomy with the help of AI algorithms. Credit: Breakthrough Listen/Danielle Futselaar.

The intensity of these bands has led some astronomers to theorize that PAHs could account for a significant fraction of carbon in the ISM. Other astronomers have maintained that these carbon-rich molecules could not survive the harsh conditions of interstellar space because temperates in the ISM are far too low – averaging about 10 K (-263 °C; -442 °F). However, the 1-cyanopyrene molecules Wenzel and her colleagues observed were located in the nearest star-forming region to Earth, the cold interstellar cloud known as Taurus Molecular Cloud-1 (TMC-1).

Since this Nebula has not yet started forming stars, its temperature is the same as that of the ISM. “TMC-1 is a natural laboratory for studying these molecules that go on to form the building blocks of stars and planets,” said Wenzel. These observations suggest that PHAs like 1-cyanopyrene may have a different formation mechanism entirely and/or can survive the harsh environment of space. In the meantime, detecting cyanopyrene can provide indirect evidence of even larger and more complex molecules in future observations. 

This research was supported by measurements and analysis conducted by the molecular spectroscopy laboratory of Dr. Michael McCarthy at the CfA. As he indicated:

“The microwave spectrometers developed at the CfA are unique, world-class instruments specifically designed to measure the precise radio fingerprints of complex molecules like 1-cyanopyrene. Predictions from even the most advanced quantum chemical theories are still thousands of times less accurate than what is needed to identify these molecules in space with radio telescopes, so experiments in laboratories like ours are indispensable to these ground-breaking astronomical discoveries.”

Further Reading: CfA

The post Astronomers Discover Potential New Building Block of Organic Matter in Interstellar Space appeared first on Universe Today.

The Solar System’s hundreds of moons are like puzzle pieces. Together, they make a picture of all the forces that can create and modify them and the forces that shape our Solar System. One of them is Miranda, one of 28 known moons that orbit the ice giant Uranus. Miranda is its smallest major moon, at 471 km in diameter.

New research shows that this relatively small, distant moon may be hiding something: a subsurface ocean.

Miranda stands out from the other moons for one reason: its surface is a bizarre patchwork of jumbled terrain. There are cratered areas, rough scarps, and grooved regions. It may have the tallest cliff in the Solar System, a 20 km drop named Verona Rupes. Many researchers think its surface is deformed by tidal heating from gravitational interactions with some of the Uranus’ other moons.

New research in The Planetary Journal set out to explain Miranda’s jumbled geology. It’s titled “Constraining Ocean and Ice Shell Thickness on Miranda from Surface Geological Structures and Stress Modeling.” The lead author is Caleb Strom, a graduate student at the University of North Dakota.

“To find evidence of an ocean inside a small object like Miranda is incredibly surprising,”

Tom Nordheim, co-author and planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

Scientists don’t have much to go on when it comes to Miranda. The only spacecraft to image it was Voyager 2 in 1986. Even then, the flyby was brief, and the spacecraft only imaged the moon’s southern hemisphere. But that was enough to reveal the moon’s bizarre and complex geological surface features. Miranda’s strange surface coronae attracted a lot of attention.

This figure from the study shows some of Miranda’s surface features. The moon is known for its coronae features, two of which are labelled here. Image Credit: Strom et al. 2024.

When the images were first received, scientists were baffled by Miranda’s complexity. Some called it a “patchwork planet,” and there was much healthy speculation about what created it. Attempts to understand the moon are still limited by the amount of data that Voyager 2 provided. However, modern scientists have access to a more powerful tool than scientists did in the 80s: computer models and simulations.

Strom and his co-researchers used a computer model to work backward from Miranda’s current surface. They started by mapping Miranda’s surface features, including its cracks, ridges, and unique trapezoidal coronae, and then reverse-engineered it. They tested different models of the moon’s interior to see what could account for the varied surface.

This simple schematic shows the four-layer model Strom and his co-researchers worked with. Image Credit: Strom et al. 2024.

The model that best matched the surface was one where Miranda had a vast ocean under its surface some 100-500 million years ago. The icy crust is probably 30 km thick or less, and the ocean could be up to 100 km thick.

“Our results show that a thin crust (?30 km) is most likely to result in sufficient stress magnitude to cause brittle failure of ice on Miranda’s surface,” the authors explain in their research. “Our results also suggest the plausible existence of a ?100 km thick ocean on Miranda within the last 100–500 million yr.”

“To find evidence of an ocean inside a small object like Miranda is incredibly surprising,” said Tom Nordheim, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, a study co-author, and the principal investigator on the project that funded the study. “It helps build on the story that some of these moons at Uranus may be really interesting — that there may be several ocean worlds around one of the most distant planets in our solar system, which is both exciting and bizarre.”

Tidal heating is responsible for this, and it came from gravitational relationships between Miranda and Uranus’ other moons. Moons tug on each other, and when they’re in an orbital resonance with one another, where each moon’s period around a planet is an exact integer of the others’ periods, those tugs are amplified. These forces can periodically deform the moons, and as they’re squeezed, they heat up, keeping subsurface oceans warm and liquid.

Miranda and other moons of Uranus were likely in resonance in the past, which could’ve created surface fractures and related terrain.

A digital elevation model (DEM) of Miranda’s Inverness Coronae. The relative elevation ranges from 0 km (purple) to 4 km (red). Image Credit: Beddingfield et al. 2022.

However, resonances don’t last forever, and the researchers think that some time ago, Miranda left orbital resonance, and its interior began to cool. They don’t think it’s completely cooled yet because if the ocean had completely frozen, it would’ve expanded and displayed telltale surface cracks. So, the interior ocean likely still exists but is probably much thinner than in the past. “But the suggestion of an ocean inside one of the most distant moons in the solar system is remarkable,” Strom said.

Nobody predicted that Miranda would have an ocean. As far as scientists could tell, it was a frozen ball. But they’ve been wrong about moons before.

Researchers used to think that Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, the most reflective object in the Solar System, was just a ball of ice. After all, its surface is smooth and clearly frozen solid. However, the Cassini mission showed us that it may not be totally frozen. There’s a bevy of evidence that Enceladus has a warm ocean under a layer of ice.

This false-colour image of the plumes erupting from Enceladus is easily recognizable to many. Enceladus and Miranda are similar in important ways. Could Miranda also be geologically active? Image Credit: NASA/ESA

“Few scientists expected Enceladus to be geologically active,” said co-author Alex Patthoff. “However, it’s shooting water vapour and ice out of its southern hemisphere as we speak.”

Since both Enceladus and Miranda are roughly the same size and may have similar ice shells, it increases the chances that Miranda also has an ocean. Other moons, like Saturn’s Europa, may also be icy ocean moons. Now, scientists think these moons and their warm oceans are the best targets in the search for life in our Solar System.

Other recent research suggests that Miranda could be more like Enceladus than thought. One 2023 study showed that the moon may be releasing material into space like Enceladus does. The ESA and NASA are both sending probes to Jupiter to study Europa and other potential ocean moons. Should we expand that search to distant Uranus and its small moon Miranda?

An artist’s impression of Uranus and its five largest moons (innermost to outermost): Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. A 2023 paper showed that Ariel and/or Miranda could be releasing material into space. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Mike Yakovlev

“We won’t know for sure that it even has an ocean until we go back and collect more data,” said study co-author Nordheim. “We’re squeezing the last bit of science we can from Voyager 2’s images. For now, we’re excited by the possibilities and eager to return to study Uranus and its potential ocean moons in depth.”

For now, all we have is decades-old Voyager 2 data. However, the data and the computer models the team employed shed new light on Miranda.

“We interpret the tidal stress model results to indicate that at some point in Miranda’s geologic past, it experienced an intense heating event that resulted in a thin crust (?30 km). Such a thin crust would also have resulted in a ?100 km thick ocean to account for the molten part of the hydrosphere. This thin ice crust and thick ocean could have allowed for intense tidal stress leading to significant geologic deformation in the form of brittle deformation at Miranda’s surface,” the authors explain.

“In conclusion, our results suggest that Miranda could have had a subsurface ocean in the geologically recent past from an intense heat pulse, consistent with dynamical modelling results of previous studies,” they conclude.

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